Englewood Cliffs, NJ
It's been almost a week since leaving Deer Park, and it's not like I'm resisting getting back into a "disciplined" practice. It's not like I would be pushing myself back into it, so I can't say that I'm just not pushing myself back into it. I shouldn't say that I'm just doing what feels natural, because that sort of letting go is a slippery slope that I'm not about to go down.

I'm still processing.

I guess I didn't want to leave Deer Park, get back to New Jersey, and immediately get back into the disciplined practice thing like normal, pretending that everything is normal and there's nothing to process. Disciplined practice would entail at least two 45 minute sittings a day, and much more disciplined reading, studying, and general engaged mindfulness during the day. I'm not vegetarian, and it would be hard to be vegetarian in my circumstances, but my ideal was to only order vegetarian when it was in my control, but not avoid meat if that is what got placed in front of me - which is actually a Theravadin ethic. In the Theravadin school, all of their food is donated, and if meat is donated, they will eat meat, even though they are vegetarian. Vegetarian, but not attached to vegetarianism.

I'm processing Deer Park. I'm processing monasticism. I'm processing my path, what little I think I know about my karma, and what I might do and where I might go in the next few months. Yep, it's a lot. And most of the processing is on a sub-conscious level, so I'm not all maudlin and depressed every day thinking about it. On the contrary, I keep winning shit off eBay. I need to stop. Paypal is a very dangerous thing.

One thing I'm processing is that Deer Park, saying nothing about Plum Village, did not have a good practice for me as a non-monastic. For the monks and nuns, fine, they've already gotten their training in Plum Village and they're so enlightened they can roller blade mindfully and let children turn the monastery into a playground, screaming and playing, every Sunday, blah, blah, blah. But if Deer Park was the root monastery, I wouldn't go there. Not enough discipline, not enough contemplation, too much assumption of perfection of mindfulness. No doubt this will change as the monastery matures (it's only five years old), but I tried to envision the environment I would want to be in to practice, and I saw something more austere, even if it meant letting go of some of the "joy" of Deer Park. Not actually losing any of the joy, but a different kind of joy. There is a joy, a quieter joy, in an austere practice with respect, open communications, and a tighter authority structure which maintained the ideals of why the monastics would be there.

And joy is one of the monastic ideals. A monastery without joy seems to miss the point for me, too, even though when I first went to Deer Park, joy was the farthest thing from my mind. As for a tighter authority structure, nothing oppressive, just a sharper focus on the ideals of compassion, wisdom, equanimity, and loving-kindness, and open communications so that everyone is always thinking of those four things in their mindfulness practice. Indeed, "mindfulness" got thrown around so much at Deer Park, that there were times I was wondering what the hell mindfulness was. There was one guy who confused "mindfulness" with "idiotically slow". And one mindfulness practice I engaged in prior to Deer Park which helped me understand it easily once I got there was urban bike riding. It's not what you're doing, but what your mind is doing. And right now, what my mind is doing is not much different from what it was doing at Deer Park. Processing.